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ANZ Plus blues and Qantas' Finnair turbulence

ANZ Plus briefing baffles banking analysts and a pilot strike in Helsinki disrupts Qantas' Singapore route.

Joe Aston |
ANZ Plus blues and Qantas' Finnair turbulence
ANZ's retail banking chief Maile Carnegie speaks at the AFR's banking summit on March 25, 2025. Photo: Oscar Colman

For a journalist, riding the news cycle is the reverse of riding a rollercoaster, in that the real terror lurks in the low, flat straights where nothing dramatic is happening. On Saturday, I was panicked by the dearth of compelling material I had to work with. By Monday, I was inundated. Column-writing is also a momentum game and in only the sixth week of Rampart's life, I'm clearly still finding my rhythm. 

ICYMI, I devoted my energies entirely to bald, white Sydney fund managers, in WAM's Geoff Wilson and Regal's Phil King. I also sent the intrepid Alexandra Carlton to review the Bentley Group's new Sydney grill, Eleven Barrack (I also went twice myself). A Sydney-centric week at Rampart, and my apologies to subscribers from elsewhere – it won't always be like this!

ANZ Banking Group's top brass even flew to Sydney on Monday and hosted a briefing for equities analysts on its gnarly ANZ Plus project – its second such briefing in a month. Hilariously, having claimed for five years that ANZ Plus would reduce the bank's operating costs, Maile Carnegie now can't rule out that costs will actually rise and there was palpable disbelief among the analysts at her inability to provide any numbers around projected savings or timelines. 

Annual operating costs are $400 million higher while ANZ is running two platforms concurrently and the market rightly harbours little confidence that ANZ will be able to switch off its legacy platform in 2028 as promised. ANZ has spent $1.5 billion on ANZ Plus thus far. It will surely spend that much again, and probably more. 

For several years now, the bank's narrative bedlam over this project has been a spectacle. Carnegie on Monday characterised ANZ Plus as more like an "upgrade" than a new banking experience, which is entirely contrary to Shayne Elliott's 2020 descriptor of "our big, awesome, all-singing, all-dancing digitisation program" and in 2021, "the reimagining of our purpose". According to Elliott, ANZ Plus was "not just automation, it's a reframing of what does banking mean and how the business works". Welcome to our freshman module, Expectations Management 101, where the first lesson is never to promise your dodgy IT project will change the meaning of life itself.